Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
Finally, Lehane’s novel is released in Paperback.
This combustible crime thriller is set in the Irish working-class neighbourhood of South Boston during the heatwave-bedevilled summer of 1974. That was a period of court-ordered desegregation in the local public schools, when high school students from low-income Black areas were bused into poor white neighbourhoods, and vice versa. The goal was to improve the quality of education system-wide, to force a better balance between the funding given to white schools (which were sometimes under-populated) and that going to struggling, under-equipped Black facilities. But the actual result was scattered protests and eruptions of violence.
Lehane’s story is propelled by the vividly realized Mary Pat Fennessy. A tough, middle-aged, and single working-class Irish woman, she’s a basically good person, but has been inculcated with the prejudices and hatreds of her time and environment. She’s also without a husband after being married twice, has lost one son (the victim of a drug overdose after he returned from military service in Vietnam), and manages to hold down two jobs—neither of which keeps her head much above water. The only thing that makes her care anymore is her teenage daughter, Jules, who is set to become part of Boston’s new social-engineering experiment, and with whom Mary Pat maintains a strained relationship.
Not long after Mary Pat gets involved in the anti-busing movement, Jules doesn’t come home one night. Her vanishing coincides with the death of Augustus Williamson, a Black youth whose corpse is found at a subway station on the white side of town. Could there be some connection between those two mysteries? Mary Pat is panicked over her daughter’s fate, but the people in her community—the only people she thought she could rely on in times of trouble—shy away from helping. Which causes her to question how much she really knows about her neighbours and her daughter’s life, and also makes her doubt the motives of local mobsters claiming to side with anyone who will pledge them loyalty. Mary Pat’s determination to get to the bottom of Jules’ disappearance leads her to risk all of what little she has left.
Small Mercies presents a tangled web of tribalism, inherited ignorance, and a hunger for belonging. It serves up historical detail of an uncommon vibrancy. Short, clipped chapters are not so much written as carved, leaving nary a superfluous word in evidence. As the story leaps along, the reader’s moral compass is tested right along with Mary Pat’s. This fast-paced, highly literate novel shows Dennis Lehane at the height of his storytelling powers.
Edited by Jeff Pierce of The Rap Sheet
Hardback Review [April 2023]
Dennis Lehane interviewed at Shots Magazine [April 2023]
